FILTER ALBUMS
Is This It
Isle Of Wight band get off the chaise longue to release debut.
By Victoria Segal.
Monster munch: Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers.
Wet Leg
★★★★
Wet Leg
DOMINO. CD/DL/LP
AS ALL one-hit wonders know, success can be as unforgiving as failure. There are songs that use all their energy in one brilliant efficient flash, making it almost impossible for their creators to relaunch or reignite, to catch the collective imagination so decisively ever again. It’s the pop equivalent of a limited-edition action figure, still in its original packaging – get it out of its box, see what it could do, and there was a danger it could lose its value, end up in bits.
Chaise Longue, Wet Leg’s first release, initially bore the marks of such a track, a giddily profane spasm of insolent wit backed by indelible visuals. Yet Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers, Wet Leg’s core duo, subsequently released three more songs, each one the right amount of silly and strange, off-beam and familiar, the videos making lobster claws (the Wet Dream’s erotic put-downs) or shaggy string-suits (social media meltdown Oh No) as distinctive as Chaise Longue’s cottagecore South Park antics. While the returns have diminished reassuringly slowly, stretching into a whole album still feels treacherous. Are Wet Leg going to be The Strokes – or indie Gangnam Style? Does it matter (to their audience, at least) when they’ve already brought so much joy and intrigue?
While it would be lying to suggest Wet Leg runs the gamut of human emotion, happily Teasdale and Chambers have plenty more moods under those big straw hats. The cover shows them with their backs to the camera, embracing with conspiratorial closeness, and that indefinable Jack-and-Meg dynamic – the suggestion they aren’t quite seeing what everyone else sees – shapes the whole album.
It’s not as if their material is wildly esoteric. Parties gone wrong; romantic betrayals and turbulent exes; wavering self-belief and uncertain self-image – the songs on Wet Leg might feature mobile phones and dating apps, but they also echo a kind of slacker angst that matches their ’90s indie inf luences. Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly are strong presiding spirits – especially on the sweet Breeders unease of Being In Love or the Gigantic melancholy of Piece Of Shit; you might notice the delicate echo of The Man Who Sold The World on I Don’t Wanna Go Out first, but unafraid of overkill, Where Is My Mind? is in there too. Beyond the manic Pixies dream girls are traces of early St. Vincent, My Bloody Valentine, Blur (all on one song with Angelica’s always-in-the-kitchen-at-parties anxiety). Convincing – with Chambers on vocals – and Loving You also show the delicate cracks of heartbreak, the f lipside of that first “hey you, over there” defiance.